Strong AI and the Imminent Revolution In Robotics

An anonymous reader writes "Google director of research Peter Norvig and AI pioneer Judea Pearl give their view on the prospects of developing a strong AI and how progress in the field is about to usher in a new age of household robotics to rival the explosion of home computing in the 1980s. Norvig says, 'In terms of robotics we’re probably where the world of PCs were in the early 1970s, where you could buy a PC kit and if you were an enthusiast you could have a lot of fun with that. But it wasn’t a worthwhile investment for the average person. There wasn’t enough you could do that was useful. Within a decade that changed, your grandmother needed word processing or email and we rapidly went from a very small number of hobbyists to pervasive technology throughout society in one or two decades. I expect a similar sort of timescale for robotic technology to take off, starting roughly now.' Pearl thinks that once breakthroughs are made in handling uncertainty, AIs will quickly gain 'a far greater understanding of context, for instance providing with the next generation of virtual assistants with the ability to recognise speech in noisy environments and to understand how the position of a phrase in a sentence can change its meaning.'"

Howdy doodly doo!

[Mr2cents]

Does anyone want any toast?

Because someone has to say it...

[Schmorgluck]

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

They solved the frame problem?

[darhand]

I think not... It's not even mentioned in the article See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_problem [wikipedia.org] or an illustation: "The philosopher Daniel Dennett asks us to imagine a robot designed to fetch a spare battery from a room that also contained a time bomb. Version 1 saw that the battery was on a wagon and that if it pulled the wagon out of the room, the battery would come with it. Unfortunately, the bomb was also on the wagon, and the robot failed to deduce that pulling the wagon out brought the bomb out, too. Version 2 was programmed to consider all the side effects of its actions. It had just finished computing that pulling the wagon would not change the color of the room's walls and was proving that the wheels would turn more revolutions than there are wheels on the wagon, when the bomb went off. Version 3 was programmed to distinguish between relevant implications and irrelevant ones. It sat there cranking out millions of implications and putting all the relevant ones on a list of facts to consider and all the irrelevant ones on a list of facts to ignore, as the bomb ticked away."

Content free...

[fitteschleiker]

Pointless, content free article, where some guys say some opinions about some stuff. Where the fuck is my picks-up-my-clothes-washes-them-and-dries-them-and-folds-them-and-puts-them-away robot?

Huh? huh?

Can someone get moving on this shit? I can't afford a fucking human servant! And I'm too fucking lazy for this shit!
Here take my money!

Re:Howdy doodly doo!

[Mr2cents]

This is very, very embarrassing, slashdot. Not even recognising a Red Dwarf reference... sigh, slashdot is really going downhill.

Re:Howdy doodly doo!

[anomaly256]

Ahh, so you're a waffle guy!